Microsoft's Zune suffers worldwide glitch

In what appears to be the biggest worldwide device failure in consumer electronics history, tens of thousands of owners of Microsoft's Zune turned on the music player Wednesday morning only to discover it was the day the music died.

By early afternoon, Microsoft released a statement saying the problem, which affected the original 30-gigabyte model of the Zune that first went on sale in September 2006, was solved. The issue: a bug in the way the gadget's internal clock handles a leap year.

The solution: Wait until today when the problem will fix itself.

"I've never heard of a consumer electronic device fail en masse like this," said Matt Rosoff, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, a Seattle-based research firm that focuses on the software giant.

Rosoff estimated that as many as 1 million people may have been affected by the glitch. By November, Microsoft had sold more than 3 million Zunes in North America.

The Zune was conceived as Microsoft's answer to Apple's wildly successful iPod, but until recently it served mostly as the butt of Microsoft jokes. One example: In April 2007 TV satirist Stephen Colbert responded to a question from GQ Magazine about his favorite song on his iPod. "(A) It's a Zune and (B) It's 18 exquisitely silent minutes of erased Watergate tape."

Despite the publicity — or perhaps because of it — Microsoft's market share for music players has been stuck at about 3 percent, compared with 70 percent for Apple and 10 percent for SanDisk, maker of the Sansa MP3 player, according to NPD Group. It did not break down the remaining market share.

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This fall, however, the Zune began to win praise for software that makes it easy to discover new music. The software, which had been mocked as useless because it relied, in part, on an extensive user base to be effective, was beginning to generate the kind of online chatter more common to Apple's products. Until Wednesday, that is, when Zune users around the world discovered the sound of silence.

"Boo hiss Bill," one user scolded Microsoft founder Bill Gates in an online help forum after the user's Zune froze on the start-up screen.

Paul Mooney, who writes a blog called Dot Net Junkies, christened the day "Zune Brick Day." He noted that Wednesday is the 366th day of the year because 2008 was a leap year and guessed, correctly, that that is what caused the device to crash. To the Zune, "today doesn't exist," he wrote.

The incident has highlighted problems Microsoft has had with its consumer electronics business. In 2007 Microsoft set aside more than $1 billion to extend the warranty of the Xbox 360 as a result of hardware failures. It is currently fighting a lawsuit over the game console's tendency to scratch disks if the console is moved while it is in use and disks are inside it.

Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis for the NPD Group, said while the Zune failure is unusual, it probably won't affect Microsoft's market share. Indeed, Zune users quickly found ways to entertain themselves while they waited for their Zunes to reset. A Zune user who used the name Dekon Reighn announced a quick fix: "All you have to do is push up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, back, play, back, play, select.